Why Forza 5's Drivatar Is An Awesome Feature.

Something that's been driving me crazy recently (No pun intended) is people saying Forza 5's Drivatar is stupid or a gimmick. I'll admit Drivatar is a stupid name, but it is a pretty awesome feature that I hope makes it's way into more games. So for those of you who don't know what it is, or think it's a stupid feature. I'm going to explain to you what it is and why it's awesome!

Hard to believe this isn't a real picture, isn't it?

Using the Cloud, your Drivatar (aka AI) learns how to drive based on how you drive. So the better you drive, the better your Drivatar is going to drive. (Wow, that was a lot of "drives".) Which means you can do stuff like earn extra credits (The in game money) when you're not even playing the game or don't have your Xbox One on, but I'll get to that later.

When you play the career mode (If you have it hooked up the the internet) your opponents' will be other players Drivatar's. You can still choose the AI's difficulty like you can in current Forza games, so you're not going to get Drivatar's that are impossible for you to beat. But what this means is that the AI drive more like real people and not like....Well....Standard AI. Which I think is pretty darn cool.

And here's where making the extra credits comes into play. As I said before, the AI will be other players Drivatar's racing against you in the career mode. When you're not playing Forza 5, your Drivatar will go race around the world in other players career modes, and based on how good it does in those races, or how well you've taught it to drive, it'll earn you extra credits. Pretty cool huh?

Some people are also worried that because it learns from other people, that you'll get a Drivatar going around the track backwards or doing something really stupid. But Drivatar doesn't learn from stuff like that. It picks up the little stuff that you do, like how you take a corner or how you pass someone. It even uses your favorite paint jobs and cars.

So Drivatar got me thinking. Imagine if something like it got put into, lets say Call of Duty. But instead of having it copy you, what if your enemy learned your strategies? Or what if your AI teammates learned how to play like your friends? There are a ton of possibilities with something like Drivatar in different games. And I honestly hope more game companies take advantage of the Cloud, like Respawn Entertainment and Turn 10 are.

Another thing that's been talked about recently, is that people think they have to have it hooked up to the internet 24/7 to play the career mode, because of the way the Drivatars use the Cloud. This is not true, Turn10 will be adding standard Drivatar AI that will come pre-installed on the game disc.

Interesting fact: During E3 2013, McLaren had a P1 on display at the Forza 5 booth. At the time there were only 2 in the world.

In my honest opinion, Drivatar (Or something similar to it) is one of the best things about having an always online console. I think that features like Drivatar are the future of gaming. I also think that eventually we're going to have always online consoles, simply because it can add so much more features that just aren't possible without it, but that's just my opinion.

Sorry it's kind of a short blog. It's my first one though, so your feedback is appreciated.